PM syndrome
Harold's List
www.haaretz.com
By Aluf Benn
The summer is over, the disengagement is past and Ariel Sharon defeated Benjamin Netanyahu in the Likud Party Central Committee. The political arena has entered a rare period of tranquillity, united around the prime minister's leadership. The prospect of Sharon's political survival has increased, and with it the old questions have surfaced again: Where is he headed? What is his plan? To effect an additional withdrawal from the West Bank, or stand fast until the elections? Give the boot to Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) or move together with him toward a settlement under American tutelage?
Journalists, government officials and others spent the Rosh Hashanah break guessing at the answers and offering explanations to family and friends. In this atmosphere, any hint, any fraction of a remark by confidants and informed sources, immediately touches off a spate of rumors. A case in point is Eyal Arad, a member of the "ranch forum," who last week spoke about "additional unilateral moves." Politicians and diplomats spotted what they thought was the launching of a trial balloon, and Sharon issued an angry denial. In another case, a senior official told colleagues about the reserve duty he did in the past in Rafah and wondered why the city is still divided between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. His comment sent shock waves rippling through the political arena, as though he were articulating a new policy.
Sharon's reply to these questions is simple: "I hope we will start implementing the [United States'] road map and take a giant step toward peace," he stated in a telephone conversation on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. This approach is shared by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and by Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom. All of them are declaiming their commitment to the road map as a guide for Israel's relations with the Palestinians. For those who may have forgotten, the road map is a two-and-a-half-year plan for the establishment of a Palestinian state in stages. It is supposed to begin with security steps taken by the Palestinian Authority - "dismantlement of the terrorist infrastructures," as Israel sees it - as a condition for making progress toward a state within temporary borders, and from there to the final-status settlement. The international community is committed to the road map, but has yet to muster the energy needed to implement it.
From Sharon's point of view, Israel's adherence to the road map provides insurance against pressure for more pullbacks, as long as the Palestinians have not done their part. Following the disengagement and the outcome of the Likud central committee vote, Sharon finds himself in an ideal situation: free of pressure and enjoying time and freedom of action. It is possible to continue implementing the Sharm el-Sheikh understandings for taking the Israel Defense Forces out of the Palestinian cities and releasing security prisoners. If Washington wakes up, it is always possible to evacuate a few settler outposts and complain about domestic political difficulties.
"The prime minister would have to be crazy to jettison the road map now, even if deep inside he does not believe that anything will come of it," says a senior political source. "The end of the road map will be the beginning of coerced actions. The road map provides us with perfect armor for now, so something very dramatic would have to happen for a prime minister who is not looking for trouble to abandon it." A team of experts in the Foreign Ministry that analyzed Israel's policy alternatives reached the same conclusion and recommended that the focus now be on paving the way for the road map.
Worthless promises
In Sharon's worldview, the American commitment to the road map is Israel's best defense. Behind the Americans are the Europeans, who support the Palestinians and are now forced to grit their teeth in the face of the security condition that promises no political movement without the liquidation of terrorism. And until that happens, no demands can be made of Israel. The generous down payment Sharon gave the international community, in the form of the evacuation of 25 settlements, dissipated the suspicion that Israel does not want to evacuate settlers and is incapable of doing so. The ball, at least for the time being, is in the Palestinian court.
"The disengagement shows that you were victorious in the intifada," says the ambassador of one key country. "It is the victorious side that dictates the settlement and the borders at the end of the war." That is a feeling that is shared by many leading figures in Israel. Sharon's unilateral moves - the separation fence and the disengagement - began as improvised steps, in response to the distress caused by the suicide bombings and the diplomatic stalemate. Now they are being described as strategy, as the desirable path for Israel.
Instead of Israel being a hostage to the agreement of the intransigent Palestinians, it will determine its own borders itself and will dictate security arrangements. This is the conclusion reached by the strategic planning unit of the General Staff, headed by Brigadier General Udi Dekel; it is shared by the director of Military Intelligence, Major General Aharon Ze'evi Farkash. Both of them have expressed their approach publicly. Underlying the unilateral conception is the assessment that the Palestinians' credibility is zero, that their promises are worthless and that there is no reason to pay a price for them. On the other hand, senior officials say that this is an illusion: The disengagement was not really unilateral, because it involved an agreement with the United States and coordination with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
The differences of opinion have generated rare understanding between Netanyahu and Yossi Beilin, the leader of Yahad-Meretz. Both of them are against unilateral moves and believe in agreed arrangements, in the "give and get" approach. Their goals, of course, are very different. Beilin is racing ahead "from Gaza to Geneva" and wants an accelerated final-status agreement, as Abbas is proposing; Netanyahu wants to keep half the West Bank under Israeli rule. Beilin is closer to the Green Line.
In his actions and his hostile remarks about "the Arabs," Sharon is signaling a preference for unilateral moves. He has no reason and is under no pressure to make a decision now, and he has declared that there will not be a second disengagement. Still, it is hard for him to persuade others. In the previous round, too, he was against a unilateral withdrawal and then reversed himself, and in the future, too, he will be able to argue that the national interest requires unilateral moves. What is clear is that talk about this possibility is interfering with his desire to tie the United States to the road map and to demand that Abbas fight Hamas and the other terrorist organizations.
Sharon recently made it clear that Israel will not remain in all the places now under its control in the West Bank. Where will it withdraw to, and will it be a unilateral move or one done by agreement? In discussions prior to the disengagement, he authorized Israeli representatives to present to the Americans a deeper withdrawal in the West Bank - the evacuation of 17 settlements with a population of about 7,000. The map that was drawn up by Giora Eiland, head of the National Security Council, gave the Palestinians a territorial bloc along the slopes of the hills from Jenin to Ramallah. This would likely entail the evacuation of settlements such as Shavei Shomron, Elon Moreh, Bracha, Yitzhar, Mevo Dotan and Hermesh. In the end, the Americans made do with the evacuation of four settlements near Jenin. The other 13 are still intact. Eiland also drafted a larger-scale move, resembling the proposal made by minister Ehud Olmert, involving the evacuation of 90 percent of the West Bank and confinement within the fence line. Sharon decided at the time not to present this option to the Americans.
The existence of evacuation alternatives does not mean that Sharon will choose any of them. They only point to possible courses of action in the future. The evacuation of the 13 isolated settlements and the nearby settler outposts is consistent with the map that the prime minister described in the speech he intended to deliver at the Likud Party Central Committee meeting, before the microphone went dead: Jerusalem, the large settlement blocs, the "security zones" and the Jordan Rift Valley under Israeli control, with a Jewish majority in the territories that will remain.
Connection or separation
The disengagement created an important policy precedent, but gives rise to two other questions: whether the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza will hasten the disintegration of the PA and Fatah's rule, and whether the Gaza Strip and the West Bank will succeed in maintaining a connection between them or will develop as two separate entities. The events of the past few weeks have illustrated the immense difficulty Abbas faces in taking control of Gaza and have given rise to doubts about his eventual success. Senior Israeli officials maintain that there is no place to talk about the "collapse of the PA." The international community, led by the administration of President George Bush, is united in its support for Abbas and is not even thinking about a replacement. In another two weeks, Abbas will visit the White House, and ahead of that event, Israel is considering steps that will strengthen him and will look good in Washington. But it is clear that the disengagement, which was ostensibly meant to bolster the PA, weakened it even more.
The problem that is bothering Israel is that Hamas is liable to take control of the political and administrative system in the PA, especially in Gaza. Sharon launched an international campaign against Hamas' participation in the West Bank elections and threatened to disrupt them. The IDF has arrested many members of Hamas' political arm in the West Bank, who might be candidates in the elections. The bureaus of both Sharon and Mofaz vehemently deny any connection between the arrests and the elections. Other sources insist that no mere coincidence is involved.
The elections will be an important test regarding the connection between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. As far as Israel is concerned, the Palestinians can do whatever they like in the Strip as long as they do not fire Qassam rockets into Israeli territory. However, in Nablus, Hebron and Jenin, they have to operate with Israeli agreement. The PA does not like this distinction and is afraid that it is leading to the "cantons plan": the atomization of the territories into four Palestinian enclaves - in Gaza, the northern West Bank, Ramallah and its surroundings, and Hebron - which will be surrounded by Israeli settlements, fences and checkpoints. Throughout the discussions about the disengagement plan, the Palestinians raised as their first concern the connection between Gaza and the West Bank. They cited the Oslo Accord, which refers to "one territorial unit," and mustered international support. The statement by the Quartet - representatives of the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations - on September 20, which praised Israel to the skies for the disengagement, also called for a future Palestinian state that will enjoy "contiguity in the West Bank and connectivity to Gaza."
The World Bank is now preparing a paper on the future connection between the two Palestinian regions and has succeeded in getting the sponsorship of the U.S. administration. The report, which will be completed in January, will present the alternatives: a highway inside a tunnel, a regular road or a train, as Sharon suggested. The Quartet's envoy, James Wolfensohn, has been talking to Mofaz about protected convoys of buses and trucks between Gaza and the West Bank, which will soon start operating.
Israel has not yet held a systematic discussion on whether it would be better to encourage a Gaza-West Bank connection or strive to sever the two regions. Former chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon, strategic adviser Eiland and other officials think the separation should be intensified and that a "regional settlement" should be promoted, in which Gaza would come under Egyptian aegis and Jordan would be involved in the West Bank (maybe as the prelude to the realization of the right-wing dream that "Jordan is Palestine"). They speak of the economic weakness of a physically divided country and about the different population in each region. In the background, of course, is Israel's demand to control parts of the West Bank, in contrast to the total withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
However, Sharon's bureau is not getting worked up about this discussion and is in fact not especially interested in it. That is a secondary problem just now, officials there say, which is not relevant to the fundamental issues related to the next steps in the process. First a decision has to be made about where Israel is heading.
www.haaretz.com
By Aluf Benn
The summer is over, the disengagement is past and Ariel Sharon defeated Benjamin Netanyahu in the Likud Party Central Committee. The political arena has entered a rare period of tranquillity, united around the prime minister's leadership. The prospect of Sharon's political survival has increased, and with it the old questions have surfaced again: Where is he headed? What is his plan? To effect an additional withdrawal from the West Bank, or stand fast until the elections? Give the boot to Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) or move together with him toward a settlement under American tutelage?
Journalists, government officials and others spent the Rosh Hashanah break guessing at the answers and offering explanations to family and friends. In this atmosphere, any hint, any fraction of a remark by confidants and informed sources, immediately touches off a spate of rumors. A case in point is Eyal Arad, a member of the "ranch forum," who last week spoke about "additional unilateral moves." Politicians and diplomats spotted what they thought was the launching of a trial balloon, and Sharon issued an angry denial. In another case, a senior official told colleagues about the reserve duty he did in the past in Rafah and wondered why the city is still divided between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. His comment sent shock waves rippling through the political arena, as though he were articulating a new policy.
Sharon's reply to these questions is simple: "I hope we will start implementing the [United States'] road map and take a giant step toward peace," he stated in a telephone conversation on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. This approach is shared by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and by Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom. All of them are declaiming their commitment to the road map as a guide for Israel's relations with the Palestinians. For those who may have forgotten, the road map is a two-and-a-half-year plan for the establishment of a Palestinian state in stages. It is supposed to begin with security steps taken by the Palestinian Authority - "dismantlement of the terrorist infrastructures," as Israel sees it - as a condition for making progress toward a state within temporary borders, and from there to the final-status settlement. The international community is committed to the road map, but has yet to muster the energy needed to implement it.
From Sharon's point of view, Israel's adherence to the road map provides insurance against pressure for more pullbacks, as long as the Palestinians have not done their part. Following the disengagement and the outcome of the Likud central committee vote, Sharon finds himself in an ideal situation: free of pressure and enjoying time and freedom of action. It is possible to continue implementing the Sharm el-Sheikh understandings for taking the Israel Defense Forces out of the Palestinian cities and releasing security prisoners. If Washington wakes up, it is always possible to evacuate a few settler outposts and complain about domestic political difficulties.
"The prime minister would have to be crazy to jettison the road map now, even if deep inside he does not believe that anything will come of it," says a senior political source. "The end of the road map will be the beginning of coerced actions. The road map provides us with perfect armor for now, so something very dramatic would have to happen for a prime minister who is not looking for trouble to abandon it." A team of experts in the Foreign Ministry that analyzed Israel's policy alternatives reached the same conclusion and recommended that the focus now be on paving the way for the road map.
Worthless promises
In Sharon's worldview, the American commitment to the road map is Israel's best defense. Behind the Americans are the Europeans, who support the Palestinians and are now forced to grit their teeth in the face of the security condition that promises no political movement without the liquidation of terrorism. And until that happens, no demands can be made of Israel. The generous down payment Sharon gave the international community, in the form of the evacuation of 25 settlements, dissipated the suspicion that Israel does not want to evacuate settlers and is incapable of doing so. The ball, at least for the time being, is in the Palestinian court.
"The disengagement shows that you were victorious in the intifada," says the ambassador of one key country. "It is the victorious side that dictates the settlement and the borders at the end of the war." That is a feeling that is shared by many leading figures in Israel. Sharon's unilateral moves - the separation fence and the disengagement - began as improvised steps, in response to the distress caused by the suicide bombings and the diplomatic stalemate. Now they are being described as strategy, as the desirable path for Israel.
Instead of Israel being a hostage to the agreement of the intransigent Palestinians, it will determine its own borders itself and will dictate security arrangements. This is the conclusion reached by the strategic planning unit of the General Staff, headed by Brigadier General Udi Dekel; it is shared by the director of Military Intelligence, Major General Aharon Ze'evi Farkash. Both of them have expressed their approach publicly. Underlying the unilateral conception is the assessment that the Palestinians' credibility is zero, that their promises are worthless and that there is no reason to pay a price for them. On the other hand, senior officials say that this is an illusion: The disengagement was not really unilateral, because it involved an agreement with the United States and coordination with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
The differences of opinion have generated rare understanding between Netanyahu and Yossi Beilin, the leader of Yahad-Meretz. Both of them are against unilateral moves and believe in agreed arrangements, in the "give and get" approach. Their goals, of course, are very different. Beilin is racing ahead "from Gaza to Geneva" and wants an accelerated final-status agreement, as Abbas is proposing; Netanyahu wants to keep half the West Bank under Israeli rule. Beilin is closer to the Green Line.
In his actions and his hostile remarks about "the Arabs," Sharon is signaling a preference for unilateral moves. He has no reason and is under no pressure to make a decision now, and he has declared that there will not be a second disengagement. Still, it is hard for him to persuade others. In the previous round, too, he was against a unilateral withdrawal and then reversed himself, and in the future, too, he will be able to argue that the national interest requires unilateral moves. What is clear is that talk about this possibility is interfering with his desire to tie the United States to the road map and to demand that Abbas fight Hamas and the other terrorist organizations.
Sharon recently made it clear that Israel will not remain in all the places now under its control in the West Bank. Where will it withdraw to, and will it be a unilateral move or one done by agreement? In discussions prior to the disengagement, he authorized Israeli representatives to present to the Americans a deeper withdrawal in the West Bank - the evacuation of 17 settlements with a population of about 7,000. The map that was drawn up by Giora Eiland, head of the National Security Council, gave the Palestinians a territorial bloc along the slopes of the hills from Jenin to Ramallah. This would likely entail the evacuation of settlements such as Shavei Shomron, Elon Moreh, Bracha, Yitzhar, Mevo Dotan and Hermesh. In the end, the Americans made do with the evacuation of four settlements near Jenin. The other 13 are still intact. Eiland also drafted a larger-scale move, resembling the proposal made by minister Ehud Olmert, involving the evacuation of 90 percent of the West Bank and confinement within the fence line. Sharon decided at the time not to present this option to the Americans.
The existence of evacuation alternatives does not mean that Sharon will choose any of them. They only point to possible courses of action in the future. The evacuation of the 13 isolated settlements and the nearby settler outposts is consistent with the map that the prime minister described in the speech he intended to deliver at the Likud Party Central Committee meeting, before the microphone went dead: Jerusalem, the large settlement blocs, the "security zones" and the Jordan Rift Valley under Israeli control, with a Jewish majority in the territories that will remain.
Connection or separation
The disengagement created an important policy precedent, but gives rise to two other questions: whether the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza will hasten the disintegration of the PA and Fatah's rule, and whether the Gaza Strip and the West Bank will succeed in maintaining a connection between them or will develop as two separate entities. The events of the past few weeks have illustrated the immense difficulty Abbas faces in taking control of Gaza and have given rise to doubts about his eventual success. Senior Israeli officials maintain that there is no place to talk about the "collapse of the PA." The international community, led by the administration of President George Bush, is united in its support for Abbas and is not even thinking about a replacement. In another two weeks, Abbas will visit the White House, and ahead of that event, Israel is considering steps that will strengthen him and will look good in Washington. But it is clear that the disengagement, which was ostensibly meant to bolster the PA, weakened it even more.
The problem that is bothering Israel is that Hamas is liable to take control of the political and administrative system in the PA, especially in Gaza. Sharon launched an international campaign against Hamas' participation in the West Bank elections and threatened to disrupt them. The IDF has arrested many members of Hamas' political arm in the West Bank, who might be candidates in the elections. The bureaus of both Sharon and Mofaz vehemently deny any connection between the arrests and the elections. Other sources insist that no mere coincidence is involved.
The elections will be an important test regarding the connection between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. As far as Israel is concerned, the Palestinians can do whatever they like in the Strip as long as they do not fire Qassam rockets into Israeli territory. However, in Nablus, Hebron and Jenin, they have to operate with Israeli agreement. The PA does not like this distinction and is afraid that it is leading to the "cantons plan": the atomization of the territories into four Palestinian enclaves - in Gaza, the northern West Bank, Ramallah and its surroundings, and Hebron - which will be surrounded by Israeli settlements, fences and checkpoints. Throughout the discussions about the disengagement plan, the Palestinians raised as their first concern the connection between Gaza and the West Bank. They cited the Oslo Accord, which refers to "one territorial unit," and mustered international support. The statement by the Quartet - representatives of the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations - on September 20, which praised Israel to the skies for the disengagement, also called for a future Palestinian state that will enjoy "contiguity in the West Bank and connectivity to Gaza."
The World Bank is now preparing a paper on the future connection between the two Palestinian regions and has succeeded in getting the sponsorship of the U.S. administration. The report, which will be completed in January, will present the alternatives: a highway inside a tunnel, a regular road or a train, as Sharon suggested. The Quartet's envoy, James Wolfensohn, has been talking to Mofaz about protected convoys of buses and trucks between Gaza and the West Bank, which will soon start operating.
Israel has not yet held a systematic discussion on whether it would be better to encourage a Gaza-West Bank connection or strive to sever the two regions. Former chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon, strategic adviser Eiland and other officials think the separation should be intensified and that a "regional settlement" should be promoted, in which Gaza would come under Egyptian aegis and Jordan would be involved in the West Bank (maybe as the prelude to the realization of the right-wing dream that "Jordan is Palestine"). They speak of the economic weakness of a physically divided country and about the different population in each region. In the background, of course, is Israel's demand to control parts of the West Bank, in contrast to the total withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
However, Sharon's bureau is not getting worked up about this discussion and is in fact not especially interested in it. That is a secondary problem just now, officials there say, which is not relevant to the fundamental issues related to the next steps in the process. First a decision has to be made about where Israel is heading.
posted by Marko at 10/07/2005 05:18:00 PM
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